Word: craftsmanship
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Thus qualified to appreciate comedic craftsmanship, Kanfer saw Allen's recent shows and movies, pored over a collection of gags and scripts, then interviewed him. Part of the Allen magic, Kanfer learned, grows out of his obsession with the improbable. "His mind takes very big leaps. There is an old movie with Laurel and Hardy carrying a piano across a tiny, swaying bridge. Funny, but still fairly logical. Then a gorilla appears at the other side of the bridge. In Allen's humor, there is always a gorilla at the end of his bridge...
Alan Bates (The Fixer, Women in Love) is an actor of supreme craftsmanship, but here he is strangely irresolute. The part calls for him to perform a couple of vaudeville turns, imitating the Mitteleuropäischer doctor who first diagnosed the child's brain damage and a batty vicar who tries to help. Bates pushes for the comedy as he does for almost every other emotion, and the strain shows. Miss Suzman, who last appeared as Alexandra in Nicholas and Alexandra, is good when Sheila is tough and tart but bad when she is tender. When she recalls finding...
...have wished to read that one chapter of analysis. Smiles is a film which draws on elements of all the arts, expressing vital psychological and social truths in ways which enlarge the mind through the senses. Bergman allies forms of dance, music, and theater with his own consummate film craftsmanship to produce his final statement on the nature of young love. It's the film most typical of Bergman's early romanticism (nostalgic tinges re-appear in such darker masterworks as Shame or The Passion of Anna). Beyond Smiles itself, Bergman always epitomizes the searching individualist colliding against walls...
Most of these questions are raised with subtlety and without polemics in That Championship Season, a drama of searing intensity, agonized compassion and consummate craftsmanship. The play centers on the 20th reunion of a handful of men whose lives were once fresh as mountain springs and now resemble the sooty detritus of a city gutter. A silver trophy stands as a cenotaph for their one moment of glory, when they won a high school basketball title...
...unspecific God. He manages to create a mood in time, but it has neither origins nor resolution. It is a mood of self-centered static despair. Taken in small doses, Berryman's despair is palatable, and the poems are individually very impressive for their not necessarily pleasant combination of craftsmanship and desperation...